Must the Rangers keep doing this to us?

For the second game in a row, the Rangers blew a late lead and found themselves in overtime. And for the second game in a row, Markus Naslund and Nikolai Zherdev scored in the shootout, giving the Rangers a 4-3 win over the Panthers Friday night.

This is simply not good for our health. Blowing one-goal leads with approximately a minute to play is not a good habit. However, ultimately winning such contests in a shootout is definitely an acceptable outcome.

We both were skeptical about the Rangers' chances to win the shootout -- not because of Henrik Lundqvist -- but because of the law of averages. If they were already 5-1 in shootouts, could they possibly make it to 6-1? Yes, they could and did. Riding the hot hand from the other night in Tampa, Tom Renney let Markus Naslund and Nik Zherdev take the lead. Both converted, and Lundqvist came through again to net the team that extra point and the win. The AP describes how the Rangers have managed to stay hot behind the stellar play of their goalie.

Though the Blueshirts blew a couple of leads, it certainly was nice having an early 2-0 cushion rather than trying to play catch-up the whole time. The team still has issues -- power play being the main one -- but they keep winning. We wouldn't agree with Michael Obernauer's assessment that the team "rolled" past the Panthers, but we really can't complain much about a 17-7-2 record and a team that has the most points in the Eastern Conference (albeit with a few extra games played). The whole seems to be greater than the sum of the parts on this team.

In other news...

Andrew Gross reaffirms what we learned yesterday: that Tom Renney is trying to figure out a way to bring Petr Prucha back from oblivion. Renney again said a conditioning stint in Hartford is not out of the question. The thing is, after the game Dan Fritsche played last night, Fritsche isn't going anywhere and earned another game or two of playing time.

Larry Brooks examines the modern-day scarcity of former Ranger players maturing into coaches on the team. It's an interesting piece on a topic we hadn't given much thought. However, we'd argue (without investigating too much) that this is common across all of the major sports leagues. There are more teams these days, so more opportunities present themselves than in the old days (say, in a league of six teams). Also, players make more money in the game today. We'd speculate that many former players that eventually became a coach not only did it for the love of the game, but for the paycheck as well.

(Aziz's individual update: I just wanted to add some individual notes from attending the game last night. Unfortunately, being somewhat of an airhead hurt me last night, because when I went to turn my camera on, it had no batteries. So yeah, I'm not that smart. At any rate here are some observations from in-person last night: the difference between the Rangers in the first five minutes of the game and then the rest of the first and second periods was tangible. They completely sat back on their heels, played like they didn't want to lose the lead instead of trying to score more. The team could use a more cutthroat approach -- but after that second goal, the pressure forechecking stopped, and they got lazy.

Then, once the walls started caving in on their lead, they got careless. After not committing a penalty for more than a period, they committed them in waves. The 5-on-3 kill was tremendous (a lot in part to Henrik, who came out of his net to cut down angles more than usual), but the penalties leading up to them (especially Betts's penalty) were horrific.

Anyway, while I'm a bit of a purist and I'm one of those weird guys who still thinks ties should be a part of hockey, there's no denying that shootouts are exciting. Everyone in the (half-full on a Friday night) arena stood up for the shootout, and it was loud and exciting. Shootouts are here and here to stay...sigh...

Some other miscellaneous things observed from the game last night:
* Aaron Voros is an absolute beast. He's way bigger in person than he looks on TV, and he should've been the #1 star (it was Zherdev on account of his GWG).

* Something overheard at a Panthers game that you wouldn't overhear at MSG: "How many overtimes are there?"

* The arena does not feature organ music, which is just a disappointment at a hockey game. But they did play Metallica's "Enter Sandman" three times last night. Not exaggerating, either. Three times.

* Best moment of the night not on TV: on TV timeouts, the Panthers frequently feature their season-ticket holders on the jumbotron. Well, while presenting one guy with a birthday cake for his fiftieth birthday, one of the more obnoxious Rangers fans completely got in the camera's way, obstructing the view of the gentleman receiving his birthday cake. This went on for about 20 or 30 seconds as security tried to shuffle the Rangers fan out of the picture. When that did not work, the team's mascot popped the Rangers fan in the face with the cake. High comedy, even as a Rangers fan...